Sunday, April 15, 2007

SOCIALIST PARADISE HIT BY SOCIAL UNREST

﻿﻿Back in the 80s when I took my last few courses at uni, Sweden was presented as the ideal social model. Things seem to have gone awry:

Youths throwing stones and eggs came to blows with police and fire officers in Malmö's Rosengård housing estate on Saturday night.

At two points in the evening the demonstrators were judged so threatening that fire officers refused to enter the area without a police escort.

When the fire brigade arrived to extinguish a fire in a warehouse on the same street, the stone-throwing youths turned on fire officers.

"Because of this and because the situation is tense in the area, the emergency services will from now on wait for the police before entering the area," the emergency services said in a press release on Saturday night.

Police said that no arrests had been made, although officers have made formal reports alleging that they were the victims of assault.

The Rosengård estate is known for suffering from high levels of unemployment, and for having the highest concentration of immigrant communities of any area in Sweden.

Malmö, and the Rosengård estate in particular, have large Muslim populations. Not that Muslims were involved in the ongoing unrest, of course. I mean, a couple of warehouses were torched, not a couple of hundred cars. Then again, there were no arrests...